ISSUE FOCUS 34 FEED & ADDITIVE MAGAZINE February 2025 mals are less prone to infections, which represents the basis for decreasing the need for antibiotics. As already said, feeding and drinking water hygiene is a key aspect of keeping animals healthy, and this includes clean troughs and pipes without biofilms. Additionally, ensuring feed safety by avoiding contaminants like mycotoxins reduces the risk of illness. A balanced ration with a desired composition of energy and nutrients also helps to maintain a strong immune system, reducing the likelihood of disease. Here, feed analyses following an animal-group specific feed formulation have not yet been carried out enough. If these basics are ensured, you can further optimize using feed additives, such as supplementation of probiotics and prebiotics. But I also recommend clearly identifying the aims of such measures and refraining from the more the better. Could you tell us a little bit about the projects you are conducting (e.g. MiniAbeR), along with the objectives and content of these projects? MiniAberR is funded as part of the model and demonstration projects (MuD) for animal protection in the federal livestock program. The funding comes from the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL). It aims to minimize the use of antibiotics and the spread of resistance in poultry farming through knowledge transfer. My doctoral student wrote an extensive literature overview. The majority of field studies investigating the appearance of antibiotic resistance in poultry are very descriptive and seldom suggest specific measures to improve health. On the other hand, studies investigating minimizing strategies were usually conducted under optimal conditions in research facilities. We found several topics where scientific knowledge is enormous but complex and knowledge transfer failed because scientific results do not result in feasible recommendations. Our task is to address this potential. One example is broiler bedding. From the literature, we know there is an optimal pH. There are many publications that show the influence of pH on animal health if the pH is too low and others if the pH is too high. And there are existing products on the market to change the pH, but we did not have a reliable method to check the pH of different bedding materials nor to have exact numbers to compare with. Therefore, we adapted VDLUFA methods from feed analytics to bedding and analysed many samples from farmers to get an overview of the status quo. This work will soon be published. Can you give a brief overview of the data you have collected since the MiniAbeR project started in 2023? What kind of a picture do the results paint? Everything else in the project is ongoing. We took samples from 11 farms and samples are currently processed in the lab. Unfortunately, we only have preliminary results from this sampling at this point. Our aim is to apply the suggested methods, protocols, or standard procedures and derive recommendations in combination with the resistance status of real farms. For this purpose, it would be helpful to have more farms participating. Due to the avian influenza, regrettably, the willingness to attend is limited. About Prof. Dr. Julia Steinhoff-Wagner Prof. Dr. Julia Steinhoff-Wagner studied agricultural sciences at the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel, then completed her doctoral thesis at the Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology in Dummerstorf and worked as a postdoc at the USDA/ ARS Children's Nutrition Research Center in Houston, Texas, USA. Back in Germany, she habilitated in the field of nutritional physiology and health management at the agricultural faculty of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. Continuing her studies at the Professorship of Animal Nutrition and Metabolism at TUM (Technical University of Munich) School of Life Sciences, Prof. Dr. Steinhoff-Wagner dedicates her researcher to the analysis of processes in livestock farming with a holistic approach. Her primary goal is to understand and evaluate the cycles from feed production to animal excretions comprehensively. In doing so, her particular focus is on challenges in the area of a more sustainable feed and food production along the entire value chain. This includes particularly considerations of animal welfare and consumer protection.
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